[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 0/6] Add support for BPTC texture compression

[Ian Romanick]

On 07/24/2014 07:43 AM, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Neil Roberts <neil at linux.intel.com> wrote:
>> Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> writes:
>>
>>> Is that NVIDIA's off-line compression tool, or is that the compressor
>>> in the driver?
>>
>> I was talking about the offline compressor. I don't know what NVidia's
>> online compressor is like. Yes, perhaps if we can get a quick compressor
>> with reasonable results then it starts to make sense to compress on the
>> fly.
> 
> Just a thought -- if online compression is highly unexpected, perhaps
> it'd be reasonably to make a *horrid* compressor that doesn't rely on
> any external libraries? I don't know how complex the BPTC format is,
> but I suspect it may be possible to do a simple conversion that does
> ~0 compression (and may actually make things larger).
> 
> This would allow you to separate the problem of BPTC support in mesa
> and all the potential external dependency/licensing issues.

Almost all texture compression formats, including BPTC, are fixed-rate
codecs.  You always get M:N compression, but the quality of the result
may differ.

> Cheers,
> 
>   -ilia